City
Bylae
Kolat · Kulat Hanları
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Bylae is a copyist's slip for Pylae, Greek for 'the gates', and the place was the Pontic Gates, the pass over the Paryadres mountains at Kolat Hanları in north-eastern Turkey. It lay in Lesser Armenia on the road from Trapezus, now Trabzon, to Satala, on the shorter but steeper summer route that Xenophon and his Ten Thousand probably took. The map marks it with a pair of towers, a sign of importance. Much later an Ottoman caravanserai stood here, where the Silk Road met side routes, yet with only four snow-free months a year the pass suited no permanent Roman fort.